


let me sail, let me crash upon your shore

by Siria



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-04-09
Updated: 2007-04-09
Packaged: 2017-10-03 19:39:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They're seven days out from Lynthon City, but the captain tells John it'll be another seven days still before they reach the capital; it's the half-way point of the journey, and the sky is like nothing John's ever seen</p>
            </blockquote>





	let me sail, let me crash upon your shore

They're seven days out from Lynthon City, but the captain tells John it'll be another seven days still before they reach the capital; it's the half-way point of the journey, and the sky is like nothing John's ever seen—a deep and monochrome blue that flares brightly overhead through the breaks in the jungle canopy. During the day, he likes to lie on his back on the deck, right up at the prow, and watch it, look for the glimpses that appear through the breaks in the trees, trying to read rhythm and pattern in the way the blue appears and disappears, in the play of light and shadow.

Elizabeth joins him up there, sometimes, when she's tired of resting and the heat of the cabin below has become too much; the lines drawn there by worry and exhaustion are becoming blurred, fading away beneath the smile on her lips and the colour in her cheeks. She laughs more, and she's slowly regaining the use of her arm; the captain sits with her sometimes and teaches her some of the written Yanthari language, a language that skitters and jerks across the page, needing black ink for nouns and blue ink for verbs and an absolute mastery of brushstrokes at all times. Her tongue pokes out between her teeth a little as she works, her handwriting still cramped and awkward when scrawling 'Elizabeth' in seven different languages.

"You're getting there," John offers one day, when even the young priest Mekrin offers approval for her rendering of a sutra in High Yanthari; Elizabeth's smile is a little pleased, and she tells him that she's having flashbacks to the time she spent working on the intricacies of Goa'uld grammar with Daniel Jackson.

"I'm not entirely sure whether he and Mekrin here would get along like a house on fire, or whether they'd strangle one another," she says ruefully, and John snorts as he gets to his feet.

Elizabeth sits cross-legged on the prow; Ronon and Teyla and Laura laze on the mid-section, where the deck broadens out and the spray splashes high to cool over-heated skin; Rodney stays at the stern, beneath the broad canopy that gives shade during the day and covers the sleeping pallets at night. He's made a kind of nest back here, so that he doesn't have to move far while the bones in his leg are still knitting back together. He spends his days working with the one laptop they managed to salvage and convert to solar batteries, or scribbling equations on batches of paper taken from Elizabeth, equations he could use to manufacture ZPMs if they ever had the means again.

"Hey, buddy," John says. Rodney's taking a break for a little while, it seems, dozing on one of the low white chairs that litter this part of the deck.

"Mmpfh," Rodney says, which John translates as _Hey_ and _'m sleepin'_ and _lie down with me_, so John does.

"Hey," he says again, softly, and Rodney reaches out, eyes closed, and twines their fingers together. "How you doing?"

"Good," Rodney mumbles, "I'm taking a lil' break." He shivers and shifts so that he's lying against John's side, all heat-slick skin and warm cotton, presses against him as if they weren't on a planet of endless summer, as if Rodney's cold and John's all blessed heat.

"Captain says we're halfway there," John says, slinging an arm around Rodney and stroking the nape of his neck, his hair where it's grown long enough to curl down over his collar.

"Mmm," Rodney says, resting his head against John's shoulder, pressing a sleepy kiss to his collarbone, another one over his heart, "maybe."

John sits back and lets Rodney sleep against him. From this part of the stern, looking back, all you can see is sky and water, the broad, blue-green river stretching away behind them, the foam and curl of the ship's wake, and for John, with Rodney next to him and something unknown ahead of him, it's almost like being home.


End file.
